Root Gorelick reporting on Carleton University's Board of Governors
5 December 2016
Sexual Violence Policy
The Board of Governors approved a new sexual violence policy on 1 December 2016. The version of this policy that was passed (here or see the meeting materials posted online for 1 December 2016) was essentially identical to the draft released by the administration on 6 October 2016, a version that many stakeholders on campus were highly critical of. Provincial law mandated that a sexual violence policy be fully implemented no later than 1 January 2017.
Discussion of the sexual violence policy at the open session of the Board started with the former chair of the Board moving that the Board pass the proposed policy without amendment. Things were then handed-off to the vice-president for students and enrolment, who did little more then hand-off matters to her director of student affairs. This director, who is usually very good, proceeded to drone on for 35-minutes with a monologue that either lacked content or contained content in a Trump-like fashion. One way to suppress discussion is to monopolize all allotted time with a soliloquy.
When discussion of the policy finally did begin amongst all Board members, the Board’s executive was adversarial, as noted in the Ottawa Citizen. The former chair of the Board said that he simply wanted this matter to go away: “I’m interested in getting a policy over and done with.” A student governor asked that interested and knowledgeable stakeholders - the ones that were critical of the 6 October 2016 draft policy - be allowed to express their concerns to the Board, something that had not and was not allowed. The vice-chair of the Board then browbeat that governor so much that the student governor had to leave the room (see here). The vice-chair forcefully said to him, “I have a governance point: If you don’t feel you can speak for graduate students, then why are you here?”
There are two profound ironies to the above quote by the current vice-chair that were directed at the student governor [other than that these two individuals having a history, with the vice-chair previously and unapologetically accusing this student of using “the tactics of Brownshirts and Maosists”]... Root Gorelick reporting on Carleton University's Board of Governors